internet pioneers
Vint Cerf: November 14, 2011
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/14/vint-cerf
"When Bob and I started writing the specs for the Internet in 1973" Only a handful of people can start a sentence anything like that.
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Robert E. Kahn is Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a thirteen year term at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.
After receiving a B.E.E. from the City College of New York in 1960, Dr. Kahn earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively. He worked on the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and then became an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet, the first packet-switched network. In 1972 he moved to DARPA and subsequently became Director of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). While Director of IPTO he initiated the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government. Dr. Kahn conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. He is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible for originating DARPA's Internet Program. Until recently, CNRI provided the Secretariat for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Dr. Kahn also coined the term National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the mid 1980s which later became more widely known as the Information Super Highway.
In his recent work, Dr. Kahn has been developing the concept of a digital object architecture as a key middleware component of the NII. This notion is providing a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems and is being used in many applications such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). He is a co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software agents in the network environment. Dr. Kahn is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of AAAI, a Fellow of ACM and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. He is a member of the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, a former member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, a former member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine and the President's Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure.
He is a recipient of the AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award, the Marconi Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the President's Award from ACM, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the ACM Software Systems Award, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award, the ASIS Special Award and the Public Service Award from the Computing Research Board. He has twice received the Secretary of Defense Civilian Service Award. He is a recipient of the 1997 National Medal of Technology, the 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award, and the 2004 A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Dr. Kahn received the 2003 Digital ID World award for the Digital Object Architecture as a significant contribution (technology, policy or social) to the digital identity industry. In 2005, he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal from the Alumni Association of the City College of New York, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the C & C Prize in Tokyo, Japan. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006, and awarded the Japan Prize for his work in "Information Communication Theory and Technology" in 2008. He received the Harold Pender Award from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
Dr. Kahn has received honorary degrees from Princeton University, University of Pavia, ETH Zurich, University of Maryland, George Mason University, the University of Central Florida and the University of Pisa, and an honorary fellowship from University College, London.
J.D. Falk - In Memoriam* 17 November, 2011
J.D. Falk was a founder of CAUCE, and one of the nicest people
in the anti-spam community. Besides being a board member of CAUCE U.S. since its inception in 1997, he went on to support the organization as a member of the CAUCE North America Executive. His tireless efforts helped to make CAUCE what it is today.
During his career, J.D. worked at Erols, Priori, Critical Path, MAPS, Yahoo!,Microsoft, and Return Path, but perhaps his most important contributions in fighting online abuse were to the Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group, wherein his tireless efforts organizing the MAAWG meetings were literally immeasurable.
J.D. was a prolific author, his writing published on CircleID, at his employer Return Path's website, and in the RFC process at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). His contributions went far towards making the Internet a better, safer place for us all. Perhaps the coolest tribute thus far is that the IETF, at the encouragement of
Dave Crocker and Murray Kucherawy, published RFC 6449 moments prior to J.D.'s passing. - neil
John McCarthy, 1927–2011 Creator Of Lisp, John McCarthy, Dead At 84 A titan of computing for 50 years whose achievements will shape the next 50 http://spectrum.ieee.org/
October 2011 Gene Schultz, R. I. P.
Gene formed and managed the Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) — an incident response team for the U.S. Department of Energy — from 1986–1992. This was the first formal incident response team, predating the CERT/CC by several years. He also was instrumental in the founding of FIRST — the Forum of Incident Response & Security Teams. During his 30 years of work in security, Gene authored or co-authored over 120 papers, and five books. He was manager of the I4 program at SRI from 1994–1998. From 2002–2007, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Computers and Security — the oldest journal in computing security — and continued to serve on its editorial board. Gene was also an associate editor of Network Security. He was a member of the accreditation board of the Institute of Information Security Professionals (IISP).
March 27, 2011 Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/technology/28baran.html
Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today's Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84. The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, David.
In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching."
Mr. Baran's idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another.
Mr. Baran's invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.
“Paul wasn't afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google who was a colleague and longtime friend of Mr. Baran's. “AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn't work, and wouldn't participate in the Arpanet project,” he said. In 1969, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet, a network that used Mr. Baran's ideas, and those of others. The Arpanet was eventually replaced by the Internet, and packet switching still lies at the heart of the network's internal workings.
Paul Baran was born on April 29, 1926, in Grodno, Poland. His parents moved to the United States in 1928, and Mr. Baran grew up in Philadelphia. His father was a grocer, and as a boy, Paul delivered orders to customers in a small red wagon.
He attended the Drexel Institute of Technology, which later became Drexel University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1949. He took his first job at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, testing parts of radio tubes for an early commercial computer, the Univac. In 1955, he married Evelyn Murphy, and they moved to Los Angeles, where Mr. Baran took a job at Hughes Aircraft working on radar data processing systems. He enrolled in night classes at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mr. Baran received a master's degree in engineering from U.C.L.A. in 1959. Gerald Estrin, who was Mr. Baran's adviser, said Mr. Baran was the first student he ever had who actually went to the Patent Office in Washington to investigate whether his master's work, on character recognition, was patentable. “From that day on, my expectations of him changed,” Dr. Estrin said. “He wasn't just a serious student, but a young man who was looking to have an effect on the world.”
In 1959, Mr. Baran left Hughes to join RAND's computer science department. He quickly developed an interest in the survivability of communications systems in the event of a nuclear attack, and spent the next several years at RAND working on a series of 13 papers — two of them classified — under contract to the Air Force, titled, “On Distributed Communications.”
About the same time that Mr. Baran had his idea, similar plans for creating such networks were percolating in the computing community. Donald Davies of the British National Physical Laboratory, working a continent away, had a similar idea for dividing digital messages into chunks he called packets. “In the golden era of the early 1960s, these ideas were in the air,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at U.C.L.A. who was working on similar networking systems in the 1960s.
Mr. Baran left RAND in 1968 to co-found the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research group specializing in long-range forecasting. Mr. Baran was also an entrepreneur. He started seven companies, five of which eventually went public. In recent years, the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken proponent of distributing credit widely. “The Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” he said in an interview in 2001. “The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a cathedral.' “Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, 'Well, who built the cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”
Mr. Baran's wife, Evelyn, died in 2007. In addition to his son, David, of Atherton, Calif., he is survived by three grandchildren; and his companion of recent years, Ruth Rothman.
Subject: Re: [IP] Paul Baran
Dave, We will all miss Paul and his positive, encouraging spirit. His ideas and insights literally helped spark what will be seen by historians as one of the major turning points in human history. He was quite active and vital to the end of his life. Exactly one year ago, March 27, 2010, I had the following email message from him in response to a speech draft I shared with him:
Hi Peter
Yes, your message finds me alive and well and busier than ever – as a retirement failure (I know the theory, but fail in implementation). I'm still busy with new technology development and nascent ventures. Thank you for your most gracious words and describing the reality of how things get done and the duality of motivation. Thank you for introducing me to him 40 years ago.
Peter
Peter A. Freeman, Emeritus Dean & Professor, Georgia Tech www.cc.gatech.edu/people/peter-freeman Tel: +1-202-294-5399 (mobile)
Paul Baran's 1971 forecasts on the future internet
Here's a fascinating excerpt from Paul Baran's 1971 forecasts on the future of network information services, from a private, unpublished study, recently discovered and posted yesterday by the Insititue for the Future, the research lab Paul co-founded in 1968
IFTF Celebrates Paul Baran: Forecasting the Internet http://iftf.org/PaulBaran2
An Evening with Paul Baran who will discuss the origin and development of his accomplishments—which span a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity, including 150 papers, 40 patents, and five start-up companies—and how these continue to have an impact on our everyday lives.This page contains a Flash video. To view it requires that the Flash plugin is installed and Javascript enabled.
Educational CyberPlayGround: Michael Hauben Inventor of the word"Netizen"
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Daniel J Weitzner serves as Associate Administrator for Policy at the United States Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). NTIA is principal adviser to the President on telecommunications and information policy.
Prior to joining NTIA, Weitzner created the MIT CSAIL Decentralized Information Group, taught Internet public policy in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, and was Policy Director of the World Wide Web Consortium. He founded the Web Science Research Initiative with Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt and James Hendler. Weitzner was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Weitzner has law degree from Buffalo Law School, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College. His writings have appeared in Science magazine, the Yale Law Review, Communications of the ACM, Computerworld, Wired Magazine and Social Research.
Stagg Newman - Chief Technologist, FCC National Broadband Plan team
Chief Technologist, FCC National Broadband Plan team
Rob Curtis at fcc.gov>, Tom Brown at fcc.gov
The takeaway from the response time relationship however, is that an increase in throughput commensurate with increases in memory and object sizes will be necessary to maintain the present state of affairs, and a trajectory of even greater throughput improvements will be necessary for increased usability." [jargon / buzzword bingo]
Educational CyberPlayGround: Internet Pioneers Discuss Net Neutrality Issues.
Internet Pioneers speak out on Net Neutrality 2009. HOME
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/Net-Neutrality.html
Educational CyberPlayGround: Why can't I send email? Blocking port25 explained...
Resources Net-Neutrality Internet Pioneers Discuss Net
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/networks.html
Educational CyberPlayGround: Gap Between Rich and Poor
Access, rights right to know Issues: Internet Pioneers Discuss
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British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who in 1950 suggested that if a computer could successfully impersonate a human by carrying on a typed conversation with a person, it could be called intelligent. The Turing Test is an adequate test of machine intelligence. Dennett notes that PARRY is the only programme known to have passed the Turing Test - psychiatrists were unable to distinguish between real patients and simulated ones.
UK gov rejects call to posthumously pardon Alan Turing
2/6/12 Wartime codebreaker's 'absurd' conviction must stand
theregister.co.uk/2012/02/06/turing_pardon_call_rejected/
The UK government has turned down a call to posthumously pardon Alan Turing. A petition to pardon the war-time codebreaker for a 'gross indecency' conviction attracted more than 23,000 signatures, prompting the tabling of early day motion in the House of Commons last week. Turing was arrested and eventually convicted for homosexuality in 1952. The conviction meant he was no longer allowed clearance to work on secret government projects. In addition he was forced to undergo a degrading hormone injection programme (chemical castration) as an alternative to a prison sentence. Turing spiralled into depression and ultimately took his own life two years later, in 1954. Three years ago, former UK prime minister Gordon Brown issued an apology for government's treatment of Turing, describing it as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair" as well as praising Turing's outstanding contribution to the war effort. The apology fell short of the criminal pardon that some - but not John Graham-Cumming, the British programmer behind the 2009 Alan Turing apology campaign – had wanted. However when the issue of granting a posthumous pardon was raised in the House of Lords a government minister said the option had already been considered and rejected at the time of the 2009 apology. Lord Sharkey said that even though Turing had been "convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd", a pardon is not appropriate because he was found guilty of something that was a criminal offence at the time.